Most traders are asking AI the wrong

questions. They're asking it what stock

to buy. Better question is, can you do

hundreds of hours of research for today?

We're talking with a 20-year veteran

systematic trading about how he's using

Claude to build and test trading

strategies in a fraction of the time and

why that changes what one trader can

accomplish. Welcome to episode 20 of the

trading floor podcast. Our guest today a

systematic day trader since 2005

currently trading 30 plus proprietary

strategies every day.

His name is Dave maybe founder of maybe

kit the number one strategy optimizer

and automation tool for systematic

traders host of line your own pocket

podcast former CTO of trade ideas and

he's on a mission to turn 10,000

hobbyist into full-time traders doing it

for a living. Dave, thank you for

joining us. This is the second time.

We're so psyched to have you on again.

>> Yeah, thanks so much for having me. I'm

excited to be here.

>> So Dave

as many know who have been in the bionic

meetings where Dave has joined us and

I've introduced Dave

Dave is a mentor to Tim and I when it

comes to everything automation and

everything strategy optimization. And so

when

Dave when you told me that you wanted to

come on and talk about how you're using

Claude automate backtesting and strategy

development. I got really excited

because Tim and I haven't done this yet.

So what drove you down this path?

>> Yeah, so I've got four bullet points

that you know, I've been listening to

your podcast. You guys have been doing a

great job with this and so to inspire me

to to think about this.

Um,

you know, I've always

I've always automated stuff like if from

the career I had before trading

Uh, I was all about automating stuff and

it's just the next iteration of, you

know,

uh, from automating strategies now to

trying to automate as much as I can of

doing backtesting.

So, I'm it's it's

you know, when I when I first started

using Claude code about 8 months ago, it

was

a trader friend of mine said, "Dave, you

should really start using this." I was

like, "Well, I mean, I'm using ChatGPT.

I mean, what's what's really the big

difference?"

But man, once I started using it, I was

like, "Oh my gosh, this is really

great."

So, it really opened up a whole new

world,

but

you know, one thing that I think about,

you know, from my CTO days,

just because Claude can do all these

things for you, it doesn't mean the

rules of software development have

changed. Like, there's still basic rules

that

people have to follow and and and it's

good practices to follow.

So, there's lots of things that

there there's

there's lots of ways that you can get

into a trap if you're not careful. And

and I've just known this from being a

software developer for so many years.

Uh, so yeah, it's an exciting time to be

a trader, it's exciting time to be a

developer.

Um,

but yeah, there's there's certain

guardrails you need to impose on

yourself with this this amazing tool.

>> I 100% agree and I feel like not a lot

of people are talking about those traps

in general. But I'm excited to get into

these bullet points as well.

>> Uh, first bullet point here, the first

step you could do to automate the

backtesting and systematic trading that

you're doing is

have give Claude the path to be able to

run a backtest on your behalf.

So, may maybe you've already got a

backtest

and

give it the tools to actually run it

without intervention. You can say,

"Okay, just go run the back test." And

that means like the tool I use is

AmiBroker.

So, that means run the back test,

save the CSV results to the standard

place,

and

not all back testing tools allow you to

do this. So,

you can't even use Claude code to run

back tests in most back testing software

out there. So, the only ones I know, in

fact, I think you can't do it in

TradeIdeas.

The only ones that can do it, I believe,

are AmiBroker and RealTest.

Uh and Kite, the tool that you guys have

access to, but retail traders don't have

access to that tool.

>> That makes a lot of sense. I wasn't sure

when you were coming on uh with back

testing with Claude if it was going to

be that you gave Claude like a ton, like

an entire CSV of all minute bar data for

a ton of stocks, and then it was able to

like do some sort of its own makeshift

back testing, or if it was this link.

So, you're linking it with AmiBroker.

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>> A lot of traders come to me and have

tried the route of having Claude do

everything.

And it's tempting to do that. I

I totally get the draw of doing that,

but it's sort of like

it's sort of like wanting to use a

spreadsheet and then like building your

own Excel and not just using Excel. I

mean, why would you want to do that?

Well, Claude could build you an Excel,

right?

>> Yeah.

>> But that's No, it makes no sense to do

that.

And that's the trap I see a lot of

traders fall into. They think they can

do it all with Claude.

And there's just AmiBroker's been around

for like 30 years now, if you can

believe me, a long time. And it's the

most efficient way to do this

for the retail trader.

And there you know, there's just been so

many lessons learned. The same developer

the whole time, same interface the whole

time.

And you know, you're going to some

people look at the interface was like,

man, this looks like it's from

30 years ago. So, well, yeah, it is. So,

that's a good thing.

>> And for you, how easy was linking it?

Um, is that something that you even ask

Claude on how to do it? Or like, how

would you go about that?

>> So, there is So, AmiBroker has an

interface, a standard interface that

Windows had and has had in there for

years of

like automating software.

So, it's a standard interface for

basically

performing the functions in AmiBroker

outside of AmiBroker via a Python

script. There's a really good example

this that I have on my mailing list. We

can put a link in the show notes to it.

Um, it's standard Python code for doing

[clears throat] this exact function.

So, it's and

you know, this has been in AmiBroker for

years, but and I've used it for years

just, you know, writing my own Python

scripts to

you know, run back test for certain

things.

But now it's just, okay,

it's unlocked to non-developers via

Claude. So, you can have teach Claude

how to do it. And

the next few bullet points I'll talk

about is

specific things you can teach Claude to

do to actually help you develop a

strategy. So, that's what that's what I

want to talk about next.

>> That's great. So, step one, link it.

And start back testing.

>> Yeah, so most traders probably already

have a back test that they're using or

they're close to having one.

Um, and that's sort of the first or they

can come up with one, you know, a

sort of a stock one pretty quickly.

Uh, just to get that function working.

So, what one example, I mean, one of the

things this unlocks is

you know,

a lot of these back tests can take, you

know, an hour to run. So, you're

you're you're

you know, you've written some code,

you're you think it's right, you you run

the back test, it takes an hour, then

you get your results. Well,

yeah, that's not immediate, so

you know, you're out of the context, you

go off doing something else waiting for

it to finish.

So, it's sort of an inefficient thing.

So, a lot of traders that I work with I

show them this workflow and then they

can run four or five back tests

overnight and then then it's there

waiting for them when they wake up.

>> Is that because they're queued one after

another?

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>> Yeah, so there's a way to parameterize

certain things in a back test

let's say you want to run different

versions of a back test and you've

created parameters

in there that, you know, do slightly

different versions of it and you're

trying to figure out which one's best.

You can have it run each iteration of

those parameters and then you have, you

know, however many back tests waiting

for you when you wake up based on that.

So, it's a much more efficient workflow

than, you know, clicking the button,

trying to remember to come back and see

when it's complete, then manually saving

the results to a CSV file and,

you know, maybe doing that in a

non-standard way. If you standardize a

lot of this, it becomes a lot easier and

your whole

workflow for coming up with strategies

gets a lot easier.

>> There would be certain models when we

were looking to backtest, we just knew

the backtest would take so long where we

would try to get everything done by

Friday so you can put it in over the

weekend.

And the overnight is I mean that's a

small Chico but it's like it's an easy

fix but such a massive difference like

>> Yeah.

>> It's like four to five x probably the

amount you're able to backtest.

>> Yeah and I mean it takes a little bit of

planning but once you get this workflow

going to see what's possible then you

start thinking okay if I can do it this

way then I can set up parameters for

this and

you know have this running while I sleep

and I can wake up and you know optimize

the strategy in the morning.

>> What a time saver. Yeah what what a what

an amazing time saver. All right so so

how are you leveraging this? Is are we

on the step two now?

>> So

>> [clears throat]

>> that's sort of the basic

step.

Um

step two I want to talk about

how to actually create a strategy have

Claude and I'm using Claude you know

you can use chat GPT in the same way or

Codex.

Um

have Claude create a strategy for you.

So

you give it the parameters, you give it

the outline okay this is what the

strategy is supposed to do

and then it come it writes the code for

you for the actual backtest.

And the

the most important thing to do here cuz

I've seen a lot of traders try this

especially with Amibroker

there's

there's lots of different ways to write

a strategy

and

if you don't

streamline it or

give Claude a reference

of a good you know this is the way I I'm

talking about when I say come up with a

strategy write it in this way

it

it kind of gets lost and it'll come back

with many different ways. Like it could

be any number of different ways. And

it's more expensive those requests, you

know, it's going to cost more tokens

for you to do that. So, if you give it a

reference, if you say, "Okay, here's a

strategy that I've created.

Use this as a reference and but do this

instead."

That's going to be a huge time saver and

it's going to

you know, this comes from

my day, you know,

many years being a CTO.

A a big part of when I was at TradeOut

is

when I became CTO, a big thing I could

see was like everybody was writing code

in silos.

There was no standardization.

Uh you would look at somebody else's

code and you were like, "Oh my gosh,

this is

this looks so foreign to what I do. This

is not conforming to a standard."

So, a big part of it was coming up with

a style guide and really enforcing it,

saying that any new code that we submit

is going to be in this standard and it's

going to be in the standard of the

language that we're writing in.

So, and that just becomes it it smooths

things out. It's a little it takes a

little bit of effort, you know, some

people think it's like busy work, but it

was a huge thing because it just every

everything gets more cohesive and and

gets easier.

>> Is it enough to just give it the example

uh script, the Python script, or are you

really like telling the methodology of

how you're writing it before?

>> All right. So,

in Amber Broker, there's like I said,

lots of different ways to come up with a

strategy.

But I have used so many different ways

and I've

finalized on what I think is the right

way to do it because there's one there's

only one way to do it where you can add

custom columns to your backtest, which

is such an important part of I mean you

know

preaching to the choir here, but

it's such an important part of coming up

with a strategy

that it's

it's almost impossible to come up with a

strategy without doing that.

>> 100%

>> And

and there's you know most traders don't

realize so

I mean

I've

created an AFL generator that does it in

the right way.

And

and it uses Claude on the back end. This

comes with Maybank

and I've heard from traders that have

used it like they were trying to get

Claude to write AFL before.

Once they started using this as a

reference

Claude became much much better at

writing AFL because it's using it you

know it's doing it the right way. It

knows what you're it knows the context

with which you're asking it to do. So

it's

giving it a reference is is just super

important.

>> I've noticed that even with writing

alerts

like I've used the first like

project that I took on with Claude was

just trying to script up a bunch of

these alerts that I had on a to-do list

that I never got to and I gave it one of

my alerts

the scripts for it and that helped a

ton.

But I haven't done on the model side.

>> It's going to be I mean that is a very

important thing to have it do. Like you

want to I mean every have you ever

looked at somebody else's code that you

didn't write?

>> It's

it's kind of jarring when it's not you

know it's written a little bit

differently they do things differently.

But imagine you know if both people are

writing with the same style and the same

Like you may you may think well this is

Claude writing the code. Does it really

matter? Well yeah I mean

it does matter and and it does make it

more efficient. So

if you give it

uh

you know

the the strategies that you run, here's

how I write them.

It's going to be a lot more efficient

because it knows what to do. It doesn't

doesn't have to guess.

>> Jared, you'll remember too when we were

working with Nick, this is when we were

like just starting out coding.

Um Nick would look at our code and be

like, "What is this?"

>> [laughter]

>> Like

>> And you're putting in nice like

>> read this at all.

>> Yeah, and you're you're you're making

this PG for the for the

>> Oh, he would yeah, he would

>> [laughter]

>> kind of get a little mad at us.

>> I mean, that's how we learned how to

code though. He'd be like, "Oh, this is

garbage." And he'd be like

>> To your point him

uh that's really how we learned how to

code because Nick was so hard on us when

we would just write spaghetti code.

And we'd ask him, "Hey,

uh

this thing is not like working, you

know, can you just cuz we knew he knew

everything. Can you just look at this

and you know, kind of tell us what to

do?" And he'd be like

"Just put in print statements." And he'd

just yell at us to like he'd be like,

"This is what I would be doing, so you

guys should just do it." And

it was great. That's how we learned how

to do it, you know, and it's just it's

funny and now I guess you don't need to

know how to do any of this, but the

thing Dave that

that I'm kind of getting out of what

you're saying is that it still does pay

off to kind of have some level of

understanding of like how this sort of

like back end like programming stuff

works when you're doing this.

>> Oh, yeah, then no question about it. I

mean, there So, there's this concept in

software development called technical

debt.

And

the way you should think about it is,

you know,

junior developers, new developers might

write code. And you might have a senior

person like Nick look at it and say

"You know, this needs to be better." And

the developer might say, "Well, it works

right here. It's doing what it's

supposed to do."

But the senior developer might look at

it and say, "Yeah, okay, it works, but I

can tell from my experience that

eventually

this is going to be a

a big pain to maintain. It's written in

a non-standard way. You could write this

in a lot fewer lines. You could You

could make that You've done it like in a

very convoluted way.

And

it's it's good to uh

It's good to sort of respect and

understand where that senior developer's

coming from because they've been through

this and they see what can happen over

time

as technical debt develops. So,

and it's uh

I mean

I'm really interested to see how this

whole Claude thing plays out because

there's so many people now who think

they're developers, right? And really a

lot of what I can see a lot of people

doing

is creating technical debt very quickly

and they have no idea that they're doing

it.

So, it's just I'm very curious to see

how it plays out.

Yeah, Claude can help with that if you

know what you're doing, but it's still

like people ask like people take on

bigger projects than

they should. It's It's just I'm very

curious as

as a long-time software developer to see

how this plays out.

>> I'm probably guilty of that as well. Not

to deviate too much, but I wonder there

has to be a way of trying [snorts] to

get Claude to continually review, like

almost debug for technical debt.

>> Yeah, there is no question that you can

set that up.

Um

so

you know, I coach a lot of traders who

want to get into systematic trading.

The very first thing that we focus on or

one of the first things is how to use

GitHub well.

Um

I see so many traders I I haven't seen a

trader yet that uses GitHub the right

way.

And it may not be a big deal in the you

know, when they get started, but once

you start putting code into production,

you know, once you have a strategy live,

and you go to start making changes to

it, if you don't have good

version control practices, if you don't

have good

uh

practices for using GitHub in its sort

of a standard way, you're going to get

yourself into a problem. I can guarantee

it. It may not be today, it may not be

tomorrow, it may not be next week,

but you're going to get yourself into a

pickle if you don't have good

software development practices.

And

like I said, I haven't seen a trader yet

that uses GitHub the right way, and

there's just a few

steps to

a a few principles

to to really use it the right way and to

set up your process so that you avoid

these pitfalls.

>> What are those principles?

>> Um

well,

using branches well in the way they're

intended. So, there's what's called the

main branch.

Most people are just committing to the

main branch.

And the reason that's bad is

it's not like

>> [clears throat]

>> the way you want to do it and when you

create a change, like you you you get

your code into main,

and now let's it's in production. Let's

say you've got a strategy running and

it's making trades for you.

And now you want to make a change to it.

Well,

you don't want to develop right in that

main branch. You want to create another

branch, which is basically a copy of the

main branch. It doesn't affect the main

branch.

And you want to make your change, do all

your testing in there, do all your

commits into that branch. It doesn't

affect the main branch in your

production code.

You can do all your testing there, and

then when you're ready to get it into

the main branch, you do a pull request.

And the pull request is basically, all

right, I'm I've done all my testing. I'm

comfortable with it getting into

production.

And

that pull request is an important thing,

and you can do code reviews there. You

can have You can have Claude do code

reviews, which is

a a really nice thing for it to be able

to do. You can have other team members

look at the code to make, you know, to

double-check, and you should be doing

that.

And then, once it gets into the main

branch, okay, it's live. It's It can go

to production.

That step is such an important thing,

but it because it encourages

the right use of of GitHub in a way that

uh

uh

you know, it it is going to get keep you

out of trouble. The other important

thing is

people take, you know,

uh

it it's good to do smaller bite-size

projects.

Especially with Claude now and and new

developers, I can see them like taking

on like doing adding more and more stuff

when they really should think about,

okay, I want to do this first, and it

should be a bite-size thing.

Create a branch for that, get it live,

and then go and maybe create version two

of that.

Having bite-size

pieces of work

is going to be super important, and and

it it's a lot easier because the problem

is people get

uh you know, create

uh you know, try to do a project that's

really big and keep adding stuff,

and they're committing it to the main

branch. They've got changes in the main

branch that are separate from the new

project. It becomes a bear to to merge.

So, if if you keep these

uh development hygiene principles in

place, it makes your life so much

easier.

>> It makes a ton of sense. And if you're

making too many changes and something

goes wrong, you can't even pinpoint what

the change that messed everything up

was.

>> Absolutely.

>> Yeah, that's that's great.

>> where, you know, imagine you're

you know, you're trying to get this new

project in and it's affecting some

production code. You've broken some

production code by what you're doing.

And you know, Monday's rolling around

and you and the strategy needs to run.

I mean, that's that's the kind of

scenario that is a nightmare to have to

deal with.

>> All right. So, you're to to bring it

back to the strategy. So, you're you're

giving it a an example

of a script that is in your style that's

that that it can use as a model

to create this new script. So, is that

Does that mean that you're giving it the

actual code for an existing script that

you have, like say in production? And

then you're on the on the other hand,

you're giving it an idea, like a new

idea, saying like, "Here's the criteria,

here are the variables. I want you to

implement this strategy idea with in the

in the form of of this model script?"

>> Yes, exactly. So, you know, it's

it could be a completely different

concept, completely different strategy.

>> Right.

>> But the the basic structure, the basic

uh

uh

conventions,

the way you make trades, the way you

uh the way you capture columns,

um

everything about the

sort of the style of the this the

strategy is in there and and it just

gives it a much better

way to get started and and and to do the

work.

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>> I mean, you mentioned like the way the

way it captures trades, the way it makes

trades, the way it executes. Like I'm

thinking about our platform and just,

you know, the data, not only the

collection of the data, but the

the algos, the actual algos that are

taking the trades. Like there are

idiosyncratic things that you end up

doing that are either maybe specific to

your platform's API or maybe specific to

your

best practices, they might be risk

checks, like things that you might not

even think about telling Cloud about the

strategy that it would be good to teach

it. And, you know, for me, like now

thinking about this, it's like there's

no way I don't think I don't think I

could just give it

like a strategy idea and then have it

kind of do what we do.

>> Yeah, I mean, just like how you do

position sizing. What's the variable

name you use for position sizing?

If you make all that consistent, your

life you know, your life becomes easier

later on, like if you need to make a

change across all the strategies. You

can search for one variable name because

you know you're been using that

consistent variable name across all the

all the strategies.

>> So, where do you go from there? Because

now you've got

you've got an ability to basically like

automate the back test that you're going

to run.

So, you can do different iterations. And

then now you have the ability to

automate the the writing of these script

ideas. So, you can easily create

different iterations.

Um are you doing some

like master automation that sort of then

like iterates through things and back

tests and you can just go sailing for

the weekend?

>> Well, you you certainly can. I mean,

once you get in this workflow, you can

and I do have back tests that run

every day and and update the back test

automatically.

So,

but the but there's still

a couple more important things about

workflows I've set up

to help it

do kind of the grunt work of

like making sure the strategy is written

correctly and doing what it's supposed

to do.

So,

I'm going to go on to step three here.

>> Yeah.

>> Which is

give it away, give Claude away. So, I've

got a skill in there that basically

allows it to run a smoke test. And what

I mean by this is

when you run when you create a strategy

and then you run it across all market,

like I said, it's going to take 40

minutes to an hour maybe to run.

Well,

you don't need to run that whole back

test to have it

to give it some feedback to see if it's

working or not.

So,

I have the smoke test where

I say,

"Okay, only run a certain day or only

run on a certain symbol." So, I've I've

set up a skill so it knows how to do

that.

And so, it can run and that that takes

like

less than a minute, like seconds to run

that.

So, it's it can quickly run a back test

on a like on a specific symbol or

specific day

and quickly get back results and then

verify and see, "Okay, oh well, you

know, I often times it can do all this

on its own." I would you know, I got no

results there. Let me see what's going

on. Um

I I got a whole bunch of results.

Obviously, something's wrong. So, you

you're

And a lot of this is tedious kind of

grunt work that you need to do you would

be doing on your own. But if you give

Claude tools to be able to do some of

this on its own, this is the kind of

grunt work that it's really good at and

can really

save a lot of effort and

uh pain in creating a strategy.

>> So, the purpose of this is that you're

trying to just see if it's doing what

you think it's doing before you like run

it

full back test.

>> Right.

>> Okay. And you're able to Are you able to

kind of cuz you said you're creating

skills, like cloud skills.

What are those? Are you able to kind of

automate the whole chain where it's

like, "Okay, do the smoke test and then

like if it's kind of doing what it's

supposed to be doing, then run the back

test."

So, you don't really have to be there in

the middle.

>> Yeah, so the

I want to bring it back to software

development one more time to It's a bit

of an esoteric topic, but I think it's

useful.

So, there's a concept in software

development called unit testing. And

what that is is

when you write a feature,

you can create what's called a unit

test. And that's basically saying,

"Okay, this function needs to be you

know, when you give it this

these parameters, it should come out

with this result."

And each time you do a build in

software, it'll run it can run all the

unit tests and make sure they pass. If

they don't pass, something's wrong.

So, where that comes in handy is

>> [clears throat]

>> if you got all your unit tests, you've

been you've been writing this

building the software, and you want to

add a new feature to it.

You add the new feature

and you run the test to make sure this

feature didn't break anything. And you

can verify that by seeing that did the

unit test pass?

Often times you will break a former unit

test that you had no idea you were

affecting.

And then that's an indication that,

"Okay, that did something wrong."

Where

if you didn't have that, you would that

code would get into production and you

would a user would call you and say,

"Hey, something's wrong."

So,

giving Claude a way to do that and to

verify itself is extremely important.

And that's actually step four.

Give it away, like similar to a unit

test,

to verify its correctness.

And the way I do that with strategies is

All right, let's say let's say I'm

creating an opening range breakout

strategy.

I've I've given it the reference.

One of the things I do is in the

description of what I want it to do is

I tell it, "Okay, I know

that if you've written the strategy

correctly, it should be matching, say,

Microsoft on this day.

That trade should appear in the back

test.

And

now, sort of like that unit test, you've

given Claude a way to actually verify

that it's correct.

So, it could go run a back test and

gosh, Microsoft didn't show up that day.

I know I've done something wrong.

Um so, I've got skills for the smoke

test.

There's also a way for it to

pull market data more generally

for, say, Microsoft on a given day. So,

it can actually go do some

troubleshooting and like tell me why

Microsoft isn't appearing.

Or, you know, maybe something about the

prompt is

you know, I didn't realize or you know,

I just you know, wasn't precise enough

or

you know, something about it can give me

some feedback about that and say, "Oh,

well, it's not in there because this."

Like the candle so-and-so isn't

is causing it not to be in the back

test. What do you want to do about it?

>> That's specifically cool. I love how you

keep relating it back to software

development though, because it's just

the opposite of live coding. It like you

said the technical debt like just piles

up. This is the exact opposite. With

real world like the analogies they make

perfect sense. It's doing the exact same

thing and you're treating it just the

same as if you were a software

developer.

>> Yeah, so it's

and it is

and another

fundamental thing that I

would

do at Trade Ideas is so I would really

encourage the development staff

to

think about

work they could do to make somebody else

on the team better.

So, a lot of times you have software

developers, you know, they're they're in

their silos, they're doing they want to

do work on their own.

But I really encourage people what can

you do to make somebody else on the team

better? And that might be

write some code to

and make it in a library so that other

people can use it

to make their lives better. So now I

think

the way I'm thinking about that the

analogy is what can you do to make your

AI agent's life a little better?

And

that's like giving it away to verify

itself.

Giving it a um

a certain function

that you know it's going to need to be

able to use over and over and like in a

very efficient way to do it.

That's going to be it's going to make

your whole workflow better. Like like

often times you'll like I'll have it

I'll have called say you know, search

for something on my computer.

Now if you just if you don't give it any

parameters, it's going to take forever

to come back with and find something

on your computer, right? But if you say

all right, look for a file it's going to

start with, you know, log. It's going to

end with txt. It's going to be somewhere

here.

You know, give it a folder. It's going

to find it really fast.

So

it's kind of the same concept for having

it do its work. When when you notice

it's

taking a little bit longer than it

should to do something

or it's doing that over and over and

over like

step back and figure out, okay, how can

I make it go faster? And, you know,

essentially, how can you make your AI

agent's life a little better?

>> This makes it so much more efficient.

It's like this is genius because I mean

to me this there's two things going on

here.

There's probably two things going on

here cuz I'm an idiot, but like A, it's

like you're outlining developer best

practices.

And then B, you are basically then going

ahead and implementing that into the

code so that those things are automated.

So like it sounds like these are things

developers, like good developers, have

just been doing like for years.

We need to make Claude do them.

Tim and I, I mean, we're just we're

homegrown, you know, developers. Like we

figured this stuff out on our own. So we

have some of our best practices and it's

all learned from like making mistakes,

right? And like we've I can't tell you

how many times we've been sitting there

coding

and it gets to the end of the day and we

want to finish this model

and, you know, Tim is starting to press

his foot on the gas. And it's like make

this change, make this change, and I'm

like, Tim, like we might need to like

back test this or slow down. He's like,

"No, no, no, we're good." And then

we back test it and like something's

broken and now we just made 15 changes

and we have no idea what like what broke

it, you know? So then we start to like

create rules like, okay, you know, let's

um

if we make a big change, we need to like

test it and and that sounds like, you

know, kind of like your unit test or

you know, something something along

those lines. And it's like automate It

sounds like you're finding ways to

automate these types of

practices directly into Claude, which

is, you know, genius cuz I haven't done

any of that. Like even as I

develop my trading assistant and my

research tool,

um those are fairly big jobs. Like you

kind of said it yourself. Like people

are taking on these big like

all-encompassing jobs where like I have

no idea what's going on in the code.

Like I'll ask Claude to like spit

back to me what is in the code base and

like what's changed, but like ultimately

like I'm not reading it the same way

that I would read a script.

You know, with Tim. And so I could

probably be using some of these best

practices

in my own projects. Like even if they

aren't um actual algo scripts.

>> You bring up a good point because

some projects aren't super like

mission critical, right? Some of them

aren't actually making trades. They're

just nice-to-haves. Which those are

great. I mean, it's great that you've

got I know I'll I'll listen to those

episodes. That that is such a cool thing

that you're able to do.

A lot of these dashboards are really

important for trading.

Um

but it you know, if it was down

and you it was broken for some reason,

is it actually mission critical compared

to

something you know, strategies making

trades? That's a completely different

thing. And it so it takes a different

bit of a bit of context and it's more

important.

>> It's true, but like I guess what I'm

thinking of as mission critical is time.

Cuz like that's what I'm hearing here.

Like cuz all this stuff takes so much

time. And like you know, Tim like before

AI came, Tim and I spent a lot of time

coding

and learning and then doing it.

And it's you know, it takes hours. And

like it still does. And now we can do

bigger and better things. So now we're

spending, you know, hours on maybe more

grand projects, but we're still

debugging and we're still doing all this

stuff. And it sounds to me like what

you're doing is just saving

tons of time

by implementing these things. Like and

so so to me like that that would be one

reason to

to maybe like take take these best

practices into like just the general use

of like any large project.

>> Have you heard this study of tens of

millions of traders which shows that

only 1% of retail traders actually make

it?

Don't be a statistic. Visit

smbtradingfloor.com

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>> Yeah, I think

I I think some of the main takeaways

like if you if you only take away one

thing from this

uh it's like

give Claude as much context as you can

to actually do something.

So there's this

I don't know if you've heard the term

one shot. I've started hearing this this

term one shot that's coming out since uh

uh you know

since Claude has come out and it

basically means I was able to one shot

this thing which means I was able to

come up with one prompt and Claude did

the whole thing with that one shot,

right? And so that that's kind of what

you're trying to set up. And I realized

this when I created the AFL generator

it uses Claude as the back end. So I and

I did not when I created that

I didn't want to

have a chat interface. I didn't want it

to you know have a back and forth. So I

was like okay, how can I set up

the form and give it the prompt in such

a way to actually give it an answer with

just one click. You know what what do I

need to have? What what are the inputs

need to be for me to be able to be able

to do that?

And I learned a lot doing that because

I realized the more context you give it

the cheaper the requests were. So I have

to pay you know that you're paying for

these requests that you send to Claude.

And

the the more

context you give it, the more specific

you are, the better off the the cheaper

the request and the better the the

result is going to be.

And

I was I have

I have a really good example from

uh the Bionic webinar I did on I think

it was in March where I

went over this.

>> Mhm.

>> An example was like the more specific

the better. I'm looking at this slide

right now. Like when you want to create

a strategy,

this is a bad way to do it. I'm going to

give you the prompt. Create a strategy

that trades opening range breakouts.

Like that's not very specific, right? A

way better one is create a strategy that

goes long opening range breakouts on the

10-minute time frame starting at 9:40

ending at 10:30 using a stop at the low

of the day

and hold until 3:50 if the stop isn't

hit.

It's a lot more context that you sort of

gloss over with that first request, but

the more specific you get it you can

just tell like imagine if

if I told you to tell me to come up with

that strategy, like you're going to have

a lot more stuff to go on and there's

going to be a lot less back and forth

with the more specific you're able to

make the request.

>> Dave, if you just emailed me create an

opening range break strategy, I would

say is this actually Dave?

>> [laughter]

>> Also, one shot, that's going to be my

new favorite term.

>> [laughter]

>> That's great. And I think another whole

episode cuz I feel like I could just

keep asking questions about the skills,

but that might even be a whole another

episode on all of the skills that you

could build cuz the smoke test is one of

them, but I like I'm thinking about like

potential like

I don't know, just the stuff that you

care about live even too. Like you have

a skill that somehow takes your live

trades and does slippage. And it's like

a slippage skill. Or like, we talked in

the past about like what happens if your

model doesn't take a trade and like has

a skill to deal with that. And all of

that we talked about in the last bionic.

But, I feel like that's a whole 'nother

world, too.

>> Yeah, I mean, similar to what we were

talking about earlier, you know,

when you see a trade that you think

should should be in the strategy and

your strategy didn't take it, it's often

a lot of debugging going on there to

figure out why.

And if like I've got a skill that, you

know, it's able to pull the market data.

So, I can quickly say, "Okay, hey, why

didn't this show up in the strategy

today?" And it can quickly tell me

exactly the bars, you know, exactly the

logic that would need to be in place for

that to

have been caught. So,

yeah, there's so much you can do here

to to

uh

to really

make your trading better in a way that

most, you know, most traders are they

using Claude now and just, "Hey, give me

a strategy that works, right?" But,

that's not how you're going to get the

most power out of it. You can say,

"Okay,

help me make my trading better in this

way. Here's this little process I do

that I know

is a little bit tedious or I know can be

automated. Let's figure out a way to

streamline that."

>> Yeah, I mean, it just

>> strikes me as like ultimately like the

more things you're able to test in a

short amount of time, the better.

Because we never know what's going to

work. And if we have our process for

testing like

the strategy cruncher, right? Looking at

the columns. Like the first thing we

mentioned, I think, when we got on here,

which is as Dave pointed out, was like

preaching to the choir. Like it's all

about

looking at those features and like

optimizing those columns and and

and trying different iterations. And

obviously the strategy cruncher is a way

to do that. Like we have a tool for

that.

But it all takes time. So it's like if

you can just do a hundred of those, if

you can in a short amount of time, I

think that that's like the key here

because it's like I the the big

constraint with strategy testing and

automated

trading for me

so far has been time.

You know, it hasn't been like we have

the right process.

It's just how many strategies can I

test?

>> You know, I I I can imagine there's some

traders listening now that are saying,

"Man, I wish I had that many ideas. I

mean, the problem is I don't have the

ideas to be able to test. I would love

ideas to test." And that's a common

pattern that I see.

New traders don't have the ideas yet.

But at some point, when they get

experience, they realize you sort of

convert to

the bigger problem, which is you have

too many ideas.

So as you progress as a trader, that is

going to be the ultimate bottleneck.

You're going to have too many ideas.

It's really hard for some new traders to

really understand and imagine that, but

that's what happens as you

progress as a trader.

>> Absolutely. Well, Dave Dave, we'd love

to have you on again

to get deeper into like Tim said, like

these skills and maybe just try to

unpack

like some of the specifics because this

is just

this conversation could go on for a

while, and it's kind of outside the

scope of like the points you wanted to

make today, but I mean, as far as the

actual takeaways of this, I think that

like there's there's probably like

another layer

that if traders are really interested,

cuz I know I am,

um could probably get a little bit more

specific to figure out, okay, like what

are these skills that I can create? Like

how do I do that?

>> Yeah, I'm happy to come back on and we

can talk through that. I mean just the

process of

you know, listening to your podcast and

what you've the good work you've put out

about how you're you know, your

dashboards you're creating using Claude

um

got me thinking about this

and yeah, I mean this was useful for me

and I know I'm going to start thinking

now about okay, how I'm probably going

to make some some of these skills

available on my mailing list. So

and and then I've got this bigger

project that's in the back of my mind.

So so my real goal here

we're talking about one shotting. So so

my real goal

ultimate goal here is to create a tool

that you can give it a chart

and then it can come up with

different starting point strategies

based on that chart that would capture

that move.

>> That's pretty sick.

>> And I'm close like I'm close to being

able to do that. I just need to carve

out some time for myself to put that

together, but I can see a path for that

working and that's

I'm excited about that.

>> Okay, yeah, I want to talk about that.

>> Yeah, that gets me that gets me thinking

a lot, so we'll be we'll have to talk

again.

>> Yeah, yeah, and I'd I'd love to get your

feedback [snorts] on that. Like we

should talk offline about that project

and what I'm thinking, so.

>> Yeah, definitely. Well, thank you again

for coming on, Dave. As always, this is

so much fun for us.

>> Oh, thanks for having me. Yeah, it's my

honor to be on here. This is a great You

guys are doing such a good job.

>> Yeah, and and congrats on getting to 100

podcasts of of your your own. That's

great. I heard the I heard the news

there. That's a big feat.

>> Yeah, thanks. I can't believe we did

that.

>> Yeah, that's very impressive. Congrats.

We're on your tail, but not we're far

away. We got a little little ways.

>> Yeah, well, we're hitting the

inflection. Um all right, thanks, Dave.

We'll talk to you soon and and hopefully

on here

uh not too far into the distant future

again so we can we can continue this

conversation.

>> All right, great guys. Thanks for having

me.

>> All right, thanks guys.